There were quite a few announcements this week at the HP Technology Forum in Vegas. Several of these announcements were extremely interesting, of these the ones that resonated the most with me were: Superdome 2: I’m not familiar with the Superdome 1 nor am I in any way an expert…
Tag: FCoE
FCoE multi-hop; Do you Care?
There is a lot of discussion in the industry around FCoE’s current capabilities, and specifically around the ability to perform multi-hop transmission of FCoE frames and the standards required to do so. A recent discussion between Brad Hedlund at Cisco and Ken Henault at HP (http://bit.ly/9Kj7zP) prompted me to write…
The Cloud Storage Argument
The argument over the right type of storage for data center applications is an ongoing battle. This argument gets amplified when discussing cloud architectures both private and public. Part of the reason for this disparity in thinking is that there is no ‘one size fits all solution.’ The other part…
FCoE initialization Protocol (FIP) Deep Dive
In an attempt to clarify my future posts I will begin categorizing a bit. The following post will be part of a Technical Deep Dive series. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol designed to move native Fibre Channel over 10 Gigabit Ethernet and above links, I’ve described the…
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol standard ratified in June of 2009. FCoE provides the tools for encapsulation of Fibre Channel (FC) in 10 Gigabit Ethernet frames. The purpose of FCoE is to allow consolidation of low-latency, high performance FC networks onto 10GE infrastructures. This allows for a…
Data Center Bridging Exchange
Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX) is one of the components of the DCB standards. These standards offer enhancements to standard ethernet which are backwards compatible with traditional Ethernet and provide support for I/O Consolidation (http://www.definethecloud.net/?p=18.) The three purposes of DCBX are: Discovery of DCB capability: The ability for DCB capable…
Storage Protocols
Storage is a major consideration for cloud initiatives; what type of disk, which vendor, and as importantly which protocol? Experts will tout one over the other based on cost, performance, throughput, etc. Let’s take a look at the major storage protocols at play in the data center: Small Computer System…
Data Center Bridging
Data Center Bridging (DCB) is a group of IEEE standard protocols designed to support I/O consolidation. DCB enables multiple protocols with very different requirements to run over the same Layer 2 10 Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure. Because DCB is currently discussed along with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) it’s not uncommon…
Consolidated I/O
Consolidated I/O (input/output) is a hot topic and has been for the last two years, but it’s not a new concept. We’ve already consolidated I/O once in the data center and forgotten about it, remember those phone PBXs before we replaced them with IP Telephony? The next step in consolidating…